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"Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day.
Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to morrow we die."

MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

New York

MCMI

London,
William Heinemann.
1901, by
MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

The Trow Printing Company
New York

To BORYS & CHRISTINA

THE INHERITORS

CHAPTER ONE

"Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas "

"Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas ?"

We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder.
The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints'
effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white
streaks of bird dropping.

"But," I stuttered, "the associations the ideas the historical
ideas "

She said nothing.

"You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she
were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of
the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident
of superseding one fatally.

In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the
superiority superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this
conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged
temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt
as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker,
proud of my conversational powers.

I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at
her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had
good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides a
something a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The
modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an
effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her
glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and
gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from
somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was
strange.

"Which way are you going?" she asked.

"I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.

"And I may come with you?"

I looked at her intent on divining her in that one glance. It was of
course impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.

"The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"

She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came from
none of the British colonies.

"You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued.
She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedral
she had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly abominable
restorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had emboldened me
to offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to the plaster of Paris
mouldings. You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviously
capable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her.
She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral guide as he showed the
obsessed troop, of which we had formed units, the place of martyrdom of
Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had just that quality of superseder's
contempt. It had pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus past
me it was not quite at me in the crooked highways of the town, I was
irritated. After all, I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger. I
had a fancy for myself in those days a fancy that solitude and brooding
had crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a writer with high with
the highest ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the world, lived
isolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do, on the hope of
one day doing something of putting greatness on paper. She suddenly
fathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I asked how she knew,
wondered what she had read of mine there was so little... Continue reading book >>